“The beauty of the forest is extraordinary — but “beauty” is too simple a word, for being here is not just an aesthetic experience, but one steeped with mystery, with awe. … [The forest] has to do with the ancient, the aboriginal, the beginning of all things. The primeval, the sublime, are much better words here — for they indicate realms remote from the moral or the human, realms which force us to gaze into immense vistas of space and time, where the beginnings and originations of all things lie hidden. Now, as I wandered in the cycad forest on Rota, it seemed as if my senses were actually enlarging, as if a new sense, a time sense, was opening within me, something which might allow me to appreciate millennia or aeons as directly as I had experienced seconds or minutes. … Standing here in the jungle, I feel part of a larger, calmer identity; I feel a profound sense of being at home, a sort of companionship with the earth.”
“The Island of the Colour-blind and Cycad Island” (Picador, London, 1996) pages 223-225
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Oliver Sacks18
British neurologist and writer 1933–2015Related quotes
Charles Baudelaire book Les Fleurs du mal
La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers<br>Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;<br>L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles<br>Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers. <br class="br">"Correspondances" [Correspondences] http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Correspondances <br class="br">Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)
Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism
“What is liberal education,” p. 8
Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968)
Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) French chemist and microbiologist
Εν Θεος - A God within.
Variant translation: "The Greeks have given us one of the most beautiful words of our language, the word "enthusiasm" Εν Θεος .— a God within. The grandeur of the acts of men are measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who bears a God within." (As quoted in Spiritual Literacy : Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life (1998) by Frederic Brussat and Mary Ann Brussat)
Original: Les Grecs avaient compris la mystérieuse puissance de ce dessous de choses. Ce sont eux qui nous ont légué un des plus beaux mots de notre langue, le mot enthousiasme. —Εν Θεος. — Un Dieu intérieur.
Discours de réception de Louis Pasteur (1882)
Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter
Quote of Kandinsky, 1911; in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, transl. Michael T. Sadler (1914); reprint. New York: Dover, 1977), p. 17
1910 - 1915
Dean Koontz (1945) American author
Source: A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog
“I just want to know the last time you saw a unicorn and do you still believe in primeval forests.”
Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer
Living, Loving, and Learning (1982)
Context: I have a lot of things in my classes that I call "voluntarily mandatory." One of the things that is voluntarily mandatory is that every student come to see me in my office at least once. I cannot teach bodies. I can only relate to people. And so I say, "Come in, and we will sit across from one another. I don't want to talk about the texts or the class. We can do that another time. I just want to know the last time you saw a unicorn and do you still believe in primeval forests. And when you come, I am going to touch you — and if that bothers you, take your tranquilizer." It is amazing how many are intimidated by someone who says, "I want to touch you." I was raised in a large Italian family, as most of you know, and everybody hugs everybody all the time. On holidays everyone gets together, and it takes forty-five minutes just to say hello and forty-five minutes to say goodbye. Babies, parents, dogs — everyody's got to be loved! And so I have never suffered that existential feeling of not being. If someone can hug you and not go through you, you are. Try it sometime.
